Ken Norton: evaluation

Transcript context

…So I was perusing your career path ahead of this chat. You had this pretty wild career. You were an engineer initially, and then you were CTO at a part of NBC. Then you're a founder. Then you spent 14 years at Google working on products that folks may have heard of, like Google Docs and Google Calendar and Google Maps. You've also done a bunch of writing. Then more recently, you've become a full-time executive coach focusing on product people. I have so many questions I'd love to ask you about your career and learnings along the way, and the writing. But I'd actually like to spend most of our time talking about the coaching and things that you've learned through that experience. And so, I have a couple questions just off the bat. What does an executive coach actually do? What kinds of things are you helping people with? What does a session look like? Then, two, just how did you decide you wanted to be a coach full time after leaving Google? Yeah, that's a great question. I think coaching does mean a lot of different things. I mean it depends on who you talk to. It is a little bit of who you are, your style, your approach. Some people are calling themselves coaches, doing more mentoring, more advice. Other people are maybe more like me, more peer coaching. To me, I see executive coaching as a partnership or creative partnership. It's all about helping my client reach their goals, their potential, whatever that means to them. So an important thing about coaching is the definition of success does belong to the client. I don't have an agenda. I don't have a set of things I'm trying to share, teach, learn. It really is fundamentally up to them, which means every client is completely different. They have different sense of where they want to go. Different barriers that might be standing in their way. My coaching practice, I coach the whole person. So there is no restriction on what we might talk on, what we might work on together. It's not limited to product. It's not even limited to work or even leadership. It's wherever they want to go, whatever change, transformation means to them. As coaches, we bring a bunch of tools to the conversation. The most important ones, honestly, are probably listening and curiosity, intuition, open-mindedness, really there to help challenge them to see things in different ways, help them tap into their imagination, figure out when there might be underlying beliefs, help them connect dots that need to be connected, help them disconnect things that feel connected. There's a lot of exploration to it. It's very jazz-like. My love of jazz has been shared before, but there is an improvisation to it. What coaching is really powerful is you may not necessarily know where you're going when you start and you follow wherever there is meaning and change for that individual, wherever is they want to go. The question around what brought me into it was actually interesting. I, honestly working with my own executive coach, started to figure out what it is that mattered to me, what I liked, what my values were, what my purpose was, started to unpack that I love deeply connecting with people and I love helping people change and grow. The moments when I had the opportunity to do that as a manager, as a product leader were the most fulfilling parts of my career. And so, I started to unpack that and figure out what would it look like if that was what I did. The other part of the journey was, for several years at Google, I worked at GV. It's Google Ventures, Google's venture capital arm. I had the opportunity to work with founders and product leaders in the portfolio. I started to simultaneously recognize the shortcomings of giving advice, because it seemed like, well, I can meet with these folks, I could tell them what I did, I could tell them what Google did, and that'll answer all their questions. You start to realize advice is not as powerful as you might think it is. meet with these folks, I could tell them what I did, I could tell them what Google did, and that'll answer all their questions. You start to realize advice is not as powerful as you might think it is. It's a little bit like cotton candy. Doesn't have a lot of nutrition. You get a nice sugar high. You feel great, both sides feel happy, but then a couple weeks later, a couple months later, nothing's really changed. That's because it doesn't often confront the real problem. It often isn't relevant. Like what worked for us at Google may not have worked anywhere else. It may not even have worked at Google for all I know. I feel like there were years at Google where all we were doing was making things worse by showing up and we should just all have gone sat on a beach somewhere, and the company would've grown even faster. So who knows? I mean so it was these just twin pillars of wanting to figure out where I could do what I like the most, and then also recognizing that where growth comes from is less around advice and telling people what to do and more about helping them figure out their own path, their own way. Then that ultimately you brought me into, hey, I want to do this full time, and that's what I've been doing ever since.…

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